Cisco's 'Black Hat' nemesis joins Juniper

A security researcher who earned fame by quitting his job to present a speech on the security shortcomings of Cisco's networking kit at this year's Black Hat conference has secured a job at Cisco chief rival, Juniper Networks. Michael Lynn will join Juniper in unspecified capacity, according to reports.

Lynn gained the respect and attention of the security community by resigning from his former employer ISS so that he could present a talk on how it might be possible to run hostile code on Cisco routers, which until July were thought to be safe from such exploits. Cisco and ISS subsequently obtained a court order preventing Lynn from further publicising his research, a move slated by critics as censorship.

Cisco said it was acting in defence of its customers and according to established principles about the disclosure of security vulnerabilities. Last week the networking giant outlined security updates that followed a detailed investigation by the networking giant of security weaknesses highlighted by Lynn. ®